Today is Father's Day. Since there is no one person that has had more influence on my business and my career than my father, I felt today would be a great day to write a bit about some of the things that I’ve learned from him over the years. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list. There is no way I could summarize all the lessons I've learned in a single blog post. But I can talk about how he's helped shaped my interest in entrepreneurship in the last 10 years. Here it goes.

Figure out what you want.

In my early twenties, I was very lost on what I wanted to do post college. I was studying new media design (a catch-all term for everything graphic, web and motion design related) but I wasn’t thrilled about working in the industry. It just didn’t feel like my calling. I spoke to my father who told me I needed to figure out what I wanted my life to look like. Where did I want to live? What should my days be like? Did I want to work at a design agency or in house creative division in corporate America? Maybe what I wanted was something else entirely? What was it?

Entrepreneurship.

At that time, I hadn’t much thought about entrepreneurship. I was inspired by father who was deep into selling books online while maintaining a full time career and working on getting his second Master’s degree in business. Before that he had several other part time businesses. We began to talk about opening a bookstore. After graduation I moved back home and started down the new path of business ownership. This leads to another lesson from my father.

If it’s not scary, it’s not worth it.

We never thought this would be easy. I can’t stress this enough, we knew the risks were extreme and that it going to be challenging, but I was more excited for the future than ever before. Even though it was scary, I was charting my own destiny. We finished our MBAs and jumped in... Eventually it lead to the creation of Astrida Naturals. I’ve never regretted that decision.